Up on Millionaires' Row, it's past noon and Barbara Smith is heading for her standing luncheon date with the Crockers.

Never mind that Mr. Crocker has been dead for 112 years and Smith must pack her own meal in a Little Playmates cooler. This is one of the classier dining spots in town.

"A view and scenery with seating. What more could you want?" remarks Smith as she settles onto a bench built into the towering granite column that marks the final resting place of railroad magnate Charles Crocker.

From her vantage point, Smith commands a broad view not only of the bay but also the grave sites of thousands of California's earliest and best-known settlers on the terraced hillsides of Mountain View Cemetery.

Just next door to Crocker's monument -- it reportedly was visible from Mrs. Crocker's Nob Hill mansion -- lies the imposing vaultlike crypt of Samuel Merritt, a physician and one of the city's first mayors. Francis Marion "Borax" Smith, who made his fortune on the cleansing agent that earned him his nickname, is buried nearby. Through a broken window, a ceiling of glittering mosaics is visible inside.

On the street below is the marble mausoleum of the chocolate-making Ghirardelli family.

"You see why I call it Millionaires' Row. I'm sure to be able to afford this property, you had to be one," notes Smith, a former Oakland Museum docent who started giving tours of the cemetery in 1970.

Jeff Lindeman, the cemetery's general manager, was unable to locate 19th- century records for those plots, but he said nearby plots cost about $1 per square foot in the early 1900s for burial grounds of 1,700 to 3,000 square feet. Today, an average plot measuring 27 square feet costs about $5,000, he said.

Mountain View Cemetery was designed in 1863 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect whose credits include New York's Central Park. The cemetery's ledgers read like a "who's who" listing of important figures from the past, Smith says. There's "a huge concentration of California movers and shakers of the early period," she says. "I am convinced it is easily California's most historic cemetery."

On one recent tour, guide Joyce Temby, a retired schoolteacher from Oakland,

shows the cemetery's buried treasures to 14 visitors.

The first official stop on the nearly two-hour trek is near an oak tree a short hike from the cemetery's circular entryway. "This is William Shorey," Temby says, pointing to a polished black granite headstone. Shorey was a black sea captain who sailed a whaling ship into San Francisco in 1883 and wound up settling in Oakland. He became a civic leader and continued to sail, but he died in 1919 during the flu epidemic.

It was Smith's chance discovery of Shorey's headstone 30 years ago that prompted her research into the cemetery's historic occupants. She and a friend were visiting her family plot at Mountain View when she spotted the grave. Because of her background in history, Smith instantly recognized Shorey's name.

After spending six months poring over the cemetery's ledgers and visiting local library history rooms, Smith compiled an impressive list of the graveyard's early occupants.

Among them are Moses Chase and the Patten brothers, believed to be the first Americans to settle on the Oakland side of the bay. Chase camped in Oakland during the winter of 1849, Smith says. His wooden house, erected near the site of Laney College, stood until 1946.

Here lies John Marsh, who started a ranch near Mount Diablo in 1837 and helped spur transcontinental wagon travel to California. Joe Shoong, who immigrated to California in 1905 and founded the National Dollar store chain, also has a crypt at Mountain View.

Beyond the names and dates, the cemetery guides like to give details about those buried there. Temby, for instance, tells visitors how early Piedmont resident Isaac Requa strung lines across Lake Merritt in order to hook up his first telephone.

"Each one of those kinds of stories makes the person seem more human," she says. "He's not just a line in a history book anymore."

Set in what was then the countryside far from Oakland's town center, the cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue is a monument to the Victorian period and its veneration of the dead, said Michael Crowe, an architectural historian who also conducts tours.

Because of Olmsted's fame, Mountain View "quickly became the place to be buried," whether or not one resided in Oakland, Smith said. With its broad curving boulevards and pathways, "people came from all over to be interred there."

Monuments -- some ordered by catalog and others designed by architects -- were embellished with decorative motifs that were rich in meaning, the guides say.

"There is a great deal of symbolism on a great deal of the markers," Crowe notes. Lilies represent innocence, ivy was a symbol of memory and lambs were associated with children. An inverted torch, such as that on the Ghirardelli mausoleum, represented an extinguished life.

The wealthy were expected to have monuments reflecting their lives and social standing, Crowe said.

One of the most extreme, Crowe says, is that of Henry Cogswell, a dentist and land speculator who was a devoted follower of the temperance movement. Before his death in 1900, Cogswell designed a 400-ton granite tower for himself, complete with fountains and statues of Hope, Faith, Charity and, of course, Temperance.

On weekends, families at the turn of the 20th century would ride a street car to spend the day at Mountain View. "It was considered proper to honor the dead, also to look at other gravestones and to experience melancholia," he says.

Time and vandals have taken their toll on the cemetery. Many pathways in the oldest areas are crumbling. Sidewalks are tilted at wild angles, and some decorative statues are missing limbs. Thieves have lifted many of the antique cannonballs that used to ring an 1893 plot honoring Northerners who fought in the Civil War.

"Why do they do that?" asks Temby, noting a deep scratch in a headstone bearing the name "Warner." "Sometimes, the vandals will come with huge timbers,

and they'll break the heads off the angels."

"It's easy to recognize that we have infrastructure problems, such as roads that need repaving," says Phil Freitas, the cemetery's operations manager. "The sidewalks are hazardous to walk on in certain areas."

Run as a nonprofit organization, the cemetery is locked at night and patrolled by guards. Lindeman said vandalism has been on the decline. Mountain View trustees recently hired an architectural firm to develop plans for repairing the older sections and map undeveloped areas of the 226-acre site.

Smith says people are rarely jittery about visiting the cemetery once they've taken a tour. "People will say, 'Ooh, how creepy!' " she says. But afterward, "They have a whole new view of people who are no longer here. It's evidence that these people were real."

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MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY

DIRECTIONS:

Cross the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and take Interstate 580 toward Oakland. Take Highway 24 toward Walnut Creek. Take the Broadway exit and continue right on Broadway to 41st St. Turn left and continue on to Piedmont Avenue. Turn left. Cemetery is at the end of the road.

ATTRACTIONS:

5000 Piedmont Ave, Oakland. Tours offered on the second Saturday of each month starting this month. The tours meet on the office steps at 10 a.m. Private tours for five or more may be scheduled by calling (510) 658-2588.